You know what they say about the elephant's trunk...

Sometimes it totally does work like that. Blue-footed and red-footed boobies (again, always a fun google). Sexual selection need not be all about choosing sexual partners of the opposite sex based on how costly some trait is (e.g. elephant trunks). It can also just be fad-driven.

I recall an experiment I read about years ago. A female duck showed zero interest in an unpopular male, but when the experimenters artificially increased the male's popularity, the female was hooked. I suspect it often works that way among people who get their fifteen minutes of fame (but no opportunity to cash out on it).

Pleiotropy comes from the Greek πλείων pleion, meaning "more", and τρέπειν trepein, meaning "to turn, to convert". It designates the occurrence of a single gene affecting multiple traits, and is a hugely important concept in evolutionary biology.

I'm a postdoc at UC Santa Barbara.

All Many aspects of evolution interest me, but my research focus is currently on microbial evolution, adaptive radiation, speciation, fitness landscapes, epistasis, and the influence of genetic architecture on adaptation and speciation.